Late 108 AC, Basilisk Isles
Ser Maekar Romaerys POV
Red Gash
His rowboat swept past corsair ships that burnt like candle flame, the songs that were sung by his fellows, his brethren, seemed as if they kept the ships burning with merely their desires, their lust and hunger for vengeance, for the blood of those who once prowled those ships, that called those ships sweet home, only to grow dissatisfied when too many were fed to hungry green and blue flames that feasted on their life and flesh and bones, consuming them whole until there was nothing left.
Nothing, nothing, nothing…
Nothing but anticipation, a moment that seemed to be transfixed into becoming unending time, yet, it never took hold, for his feet set upon the sands of Red Gash, and sparked time into moving faster than it ought to move.
His feet battered the ground, the grasping ground, the shifting sands, yet, he felt as if he was flying, fleet of feet, swift with sword, his lungs lacking in taxation for his blood, for his desire pulled at his might, at his wish to live, at his pride, and his sword swung and would swing with intent, with furious, deadly, intent.
Shouts, and chaos, screams, and anarchy, sounds of flesh and bone cut and torn asunder, and bedlam, into the fray they went, rang and rang and rang so did the steel, until the mists and fogs of war clouded his vision until all he saw was those to kill.
His sword rose and fell within a blink of an eye, less than a blink of an eye, a man, corsair he may be but a man he was still, was without much of his arm, and death came at this man, this deserving man, moments later as his sword cut through the pitiful leather armour and opened him up from chest to navel, blood spewing, blood dripping, his life seeping out of him in dreadful lethal amounts, his face was forever etched in agony and fear and knowing despair at the coming of death. Such despair…
Maekar moved onward, forward, never sparing another glance at the dead man, to the next one unfortunate enough to come across him, to the next man to make dead.
One.
Two.
Eight.
Maekar lost count, his sword swinging and battering, his body moving almost as if it was its own being, with its own wants and desires, wants of death and wants of vengeance, and he let himself fall into the abyss of these wants and desires, his mind, his thoughts, made empty for there was no space, for there was no room for anything but the battle, but the wants and desires that would see him live and others dead.
A horrific sound shook the battlefield.
A shaking shocking sound. A quaking quivering melody.
The sands beneath his feet moving like turbulent water of a once gentle river, or like the earth moving beneath the hoofs of ten thousand panicked, frightened horses.
A sound that ate at his subconscious mind even if his conscious mind said...
'Fire and Blood is not ours to receive…'
The battle came to a halt, the feeling of dismay precipitated in the air, so rich and dewy it seemed, as a shadow the size of the blood moon loomed above them.
There was something majestically dread inducing about the sound of dragonfire, a thousand times worse than the sounds of crackling fire, and a thousand times worse than the sound of steel cutting through flesh and bone, a physical representation of one's helplessness against fate, against destiny, against the inevitable.
A torrent of blue white flames that made even the most beautiful blue jewel anyone ever set their eyes upon look ordinary, the fire tearing, burning, through the field of pirates, columns of men, like a sharpened knife though the belly of freshly caught fish, their agonising panicked cries made in horror, made in terror, cries and begs of mercy, cut short, and their last moments of life forever remembered in the ash they left behind, in the ash that was, and would be, carried by the fleeting-but-ever-present gusts of wind and the sour salty sea.
In the distance, the far distance, between the rows upon rows of men and steel and shields, he briefly glimpsed the Prince battling amidst the sea of men and amidst the fringes of blue fire, a whistling blur of death, and he lost sight of the Prince just as soon as he'd seen him.
Maekar returned to the fold with his sword tightened under his grip, and he threw himself back into the battle, his sword, one amongst many hundreds of others, of more, cut short the breaths and lives of those who were lucky enough to escape the quick deaths that the breaths of death provided, with, instead, the shedding of blood.
Ample, copious, boundless blood.
He was not sure when, how, but still, the rivers of blood came to an end and the stream of death fell away into silhouettes of dancing blue fires, dancing joyfully, murderously, unendingly, as the mettle of their enemies whittled away into the form of prostrating figures, desperately praying with their shaking bodies for mercy, before the Prince who gazed down upon them with a beard dripping in blood and his armour bathed in the blood and guts and flesh of their fellows.
…mercy that never came. That would never come.
He stood by amongst his fellows as necks snapped broke and ropes whipped sharply, sparks of life ended just as sudden as they intended for the lives of those unfortunate ones that had come across these pirates on unforgiving seas to end, forever altered, clasped in chains and into lives of misery and servitude and early death.
Mercy…
Mercy was a luxury none of these pirates, these men, would receive from them.
These pirates brook none of it unto others and thus they would receive none of it.
And their steel…their conviction…both made in the forges of labour and fire, demanded no less than the end of all that they were…all that they represented.
Maekar had looked upon those they'd freed. At Black Sty. At Red Gash. And he saw, they all saw, the thousands and more slaves that were freed.
The gratitude. The relief. The disbelief.
Maekar had never known the chains of slavery.
He had been but a boy of Dragonstone.
Low birth, a son of a poor fisher, but nonetheless, he'd been fortunate.
Fortunate to be born on Dragonstone, on the lands of the Dragonlords who his ancestors had come with, and fortunate to be given the opportunity to rise to knighthood when Prince Aegon gave him and his brothers the chance to squire for knights of the Realm and got to learn to fight. To learn to read. To learn to learn.
So many of these people had been like him. Fortunate to be born in peaceful lands but never fortunate enough to live protected in the lands of the last greats of Valyria.
Never fortunate enough to feel the warmth of House Targaryen.
It came at the cost of forty of his fellows, his brethren, whose pyres they all watched burn into ash and their ash collected to be returned home to their people.
Men who died for the vengeance of Corinth, for the liberty of others, and a hundred more were injured in their duty.
Yet, Maekar thought as he cut down his sixth pirate on the white beachy shores of Talon weeks later, he knew that such losses did not weaken the collective resolve of the men of Corinth.
No.
Blue white flames burned and burned and burned in the distance, on the coasts, mixed and intermingled the fires of sickly green flames, like the fires that burned in the bellies of his fellows, his brethren, sickening them into bringing ills and torment to those who practiced and brought ills and torment to so many innocents.
Maekar brought his sword down in a wide arc, so fast and hard that the air shrieked around it, and his sword found purchase where neck met shoulder, stilling his victim with almost immediacy, before Maekar pulled back and let the warm blood flow so it would ran dry.
Maekar moved and moved and moved, faster, stronger, his blows sharper, and his injuries, the cut on his thigh received on Black Sty and the bruised bone on his left arm gifted on Red Gash, did little to halt him in his quest to kill as many as he could.
It would be an insult, to let his healing injuries prevent him from joining his fellows in driving the pirates to the Stranger who beckons them so.
As the pirates were chased away from their prized market of slaves and their beaches of barter, wrenched bloodily from their claws, from their wicked talons, those many few retreated back into their dark, lightless refuge, the honeycombed caves that seemed abyssal in depth and abyssal in waiting hunger for the blood of his fellows.
That hunger was never seen fulfilled.
Wails and screams, fused in melodious agony, echoed off of the mazing blazing walls of the cave that he gazed into with its torrents of racing fire, green licks of flames that danced with furious and tempestuous delight as the sickly green fires reached out at the air, carrying the wails and screams with them on their way out.
Wails and screams that ended far sooner than the green fires did.
Maekar walked amongst his fellows in the red-and-brown graced grounds of the market square, a ground that stank of blood and shit, where people were sold in the same fashion as his father would have sold his largest catches in Kings Landing.
They saw ten thousand more slaves freed from the grasps of Talon, people of such variety that called places as far as Leng home, even men that could not be said to be men, creatures that bore skin and looks of men but were short yet more muscular than any men he'd seen before with long arms and heavy jaws in squat faces, though nonetheless these creatures had fought alongside the other enslaved men as they escaped and fought with their chains or their squirrelled away filed iron weapons, throwing the pirates in much welcomed disarray.
Beyond the liberated peoples, Talon was a prize.
As a market to sell catches of rarity, it was well stocked in provisions and with a little aid of the tortured pirates and the former slaves themselves, entire crates of gold and silver was taken from Talon, adding to the sacks of gold and silver they took from the ships they boarded.
The cost…however, had been high. Over a hundred of their fellows had died, thrice times the lives they'd lost thus far and as many were injured.
A steep cost. Yet still a cost that had not chipped at their resolve.
Not when they saw what the sacrifice of their fellows had wielded.
What their sacrifice would wield.
For many of them, for the men of Corinth who'd once called Dragonstone and Westeros home, slavery was an affront. An evil that would see the Seven curse you to the Seven Hells.
But, as they came to know the slaves that the Prince and the Princess had freed in their boundless goodness and piety, as they all, as a people, opened their homes and their lives and their families to these children and people, such feelings of affront had only deepened, and Maekar knew that for many, to strike open the chains of these people had been a tribute to those back home whom they called friend…or foster-son…or foster-daughter.
And, as they welcomed almost two thousand former slaves amongst their ranks, two thousand swords and bows joining their quest to scour clean the cursed islands of the pirates and their pirate King, their host of locusts grew ever more ravenous to consume all and leave behind nothing but barren and dead wastelands.
The weeks rolled on by.
Grey Waters. Bloody Rock. Misty Shores.
Each of these cursed islands were fallen upon, and each of these islands were left behind with burning and ash-ridden lairs, its captives set free, and five hundred more of the thousands joined in their cause of leaving behind nothing but dead pirates.
Their ships would come to these lesser shores, though cursed they were still, with greetings of burnt of wrecks adrift in the bays and the wrecked harbours, the pirates that still lived only to live further until they met their end by steel.
Pirate lair after pirate lair was hollowed out, their gold and their food and much of their precious ill-used ships, all that which survived the fires of vengeance, taken as spoils of war, as blood debt owed by dead men, as they moved from one island to another island like the first instances of skipping stone onto the surface of lakes, quickly, rapidly, their deeds long felt after they were done being made.
Ships that thought themselves gruesome and fearsome with severed heads festooning their hulls and their decks, seeking to build a legend spoken in horrified whisper, were nought but ships to feed to the depths of the seas as their prideful hulls and their boastful masts were but wicks to the green and blue flames, the fear they once stoked in the hearts of others made to turn inward as their lungs filled with ash or fire or seawater, their burgeoning legend, once one of striking fear, instead, turned into one of warning, warning of what it means to pull at the tail of a dragon.
By the time they arrived at the Isle of Tears with their blockading ships, the seat of power of this King of the Basilisk Isles, they came with fifty-three ships and over nine thousand men. Three thousand sailors of Corinth. Three thousand fighting men of Corinth. And three thousand men who were destined to be of Corinth.
All united in one cause.
The only cause.
The cause of Fire and Blood.
"Of course you're writing in that stupid book of yours" the familiar sound of his brother broke him out of his thoughts, out of his writing and Maekar looked up to see his elder brother look at him with an exasperated but knowing look.
Out of all of his brothers, Maekar was the most studious, the one who took full advantage to learn and learn and learn. His father had recognised his curiosity and difference to his brother and once said to him that had he the coin, he'd have sent Maekar to the Citadel so as to have him become a healer.
In truth, Maekar was rather glad that his father never managed to scrounge up the cost needed for a commoner to learn at the Citadel for he would never have been a good healer. His talents, Maekar mused, had lain in the arts, not in the sciences.
"You need to stop calling whatever you don't understand as stupid, Lomerys." Maekar said with a humorous note to his voice.
"Pah! As if anyone wants to understand your flowery words" Lomerys said with a roll of the eyes before he sat by Maekar with a heavy thud.
His brother breathed out heavily, as if he'd run a tremendous gauntlet, but Maekar knew that it was out of boredom. Out of all of his four brothers, Lomerys was the most easily bored. Unless it was about fighting and at present no one was exactly in the mood to be battered by his brother just so that his boredom would wane away.
"You look like you want to write yourself." Maekar said with a raised eyebrow.
Lomerys turned him with a scowl on his face but it was not offensive in meaning, not truly. "I'll leave the story-telling to you, little brother." Lomerys shook his head.
"Nay, I'm just…restless, is all." Lomerys said after a brief pause.
Maekar closed his journal, his eyes scanning his brother's face before he turned his head towards the distance, towards the Isle of Tears, which sat in the distance with tantalising
"No word when we'll attack yet?" Maekar asked somewhat quietly.
If they'd attack.
The Isle of Tears was not a normal island. It was an island that was different from the lairs, the markets and the strongholds that they assaulted thus far.
This…this was a seat of power that was as much a town as it was a stronghold.
And over ten, near enough mayhaps twenty, thousand people lived there.
And many…many amongst its denizens were naught but people. Runaway slaves mixed as easily as slavers in that town. Just as the children of former slaves mixed with that of slavers…and that of slaves.
Almost different from the lairs and strongholds they scoured clean. They'd wrung out the truths out of the pirates about this town that Saathos Saan has made his own, and the town was a ball of contradiction, a ball of chaos that, Maekar supposed in an odd and grim way, made sense. These pirates lived by a kind of code, one that meant the strong would always find a place amongst the strong, regardless of your past.
Whether that past meant nobility, or common, or slave, mattered not.
Maekar looked upon the town in the distance. Of course…none of those people mattered. Such people were of the same ilk as the pirates. Cutthroats and murderers and slavers and those that profited from them. What really mattered was the innocents, few they may be, that they were reluctant to let die in either dragonfire or as flesh shields.
They had not been as thorough as they'd hoped, in this scouring. Some ships had escaped during their last battles and some of those ships, surprisingly, had come to the Isle of Tears to warn them about their coming.
Who knew that the pirates had such code of brotherhood amongst themselves?
A few of their people had fortunately seen the ships escaping and the Prince, rather than have his dragon hunt down those ships, had taken to burn down most of the pirate ships that had been anchored in the harbours here well before they arrived but it also meant that they no longer had the element of surprise.
As it was, the defences within the town were made formidable and assaulting it would cause many of their men to die and they could see the slaves that had been nailed to posts outside of the town wooden walls with the Far-Eyes.
A warning and a promise, Maekar had thought to himself.
"None." Lomerys said with a faint scowl before he sighed and continued "We've burned down all of the ships, the ones that hadn't been by the Prince's dragon anyway, and the few lairs around the limits of the islands that the pirates did not think cursed or too close to Gogossos, so the townfolk and pirates have no chance of escape. And there are a few men the island already making sure that none are able to escape into the jungles should they bypass the burning trees."
The Prince had burned the jungles around the town which was situated on the northern coast of the island which sharply rose into dense and hilly jungle once you were less than a league outside the bounds of the town.
"So nothing has changed since yesterday." Maekar surmised. Or the day before.
"No." Lomerys admitted "And I doubt Saan is interested in negotiating anything."
They'd sent a ship to the bay of the town and managed to get an envoy from Saathos Saan to approach the day they arrived. The Prince of course didn't trust that anyone they'd sent in wouldn't just be captured or worse, die, and so they'd managed to signal at the town for them to send someone to speak with.
The terms had been simple.
For the town to surrender and that the Prince would not kill everyone in the town in return. Of course, the envoy had demands of his own, one that could be summarised as 'leave with some of our gold and we promise not to attack you ever again'. It was idiotic in truth and apparently no matter what Ser Galaenys had threatened the envoy with seemed to change this stance of the pirates.
"Of course not" Maekar muttered "he knows he's dead, no matter he does."
"And he'd rather see everyone dead amidst him than die alone." Lomerys said with a grunt before his shoulders slumped slightly and a faint scowl formed on his face.
"I'm surprised he hasn't been killed yet." Maekar said aloud what everyone probably was thinking. The pirates stood a better chance of surviving if they turned on their leader. Of course, there was one glaring reason why they hadn't yet.
"I think our reputation has scared them into following Saan." Lomerys said with a wry smile before it turned grim "We should have been more thorough."
Maekar suspected that the tales of the escaped pirate ships had scared the townfolk into following Saathos Saan to the bitter end.
An end that may well come for everyone in that cursed town.
"Do you think the Prince will do it?" Maekar asked after a long moment of silence.
"I'd rather not see our people die for those who sta